1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for using application programs in multiple computers to render attachments for a fax job.
2. Description of the Related Art
In network computing systems, users at client computers may send and receive facsimiles through a shared system to centrally manage fax resources for network users. One prior art implementation of a network facsimile system uses one or more fax servers that are dedicated to receiving, rendering, transmitting, and otherwise managing facsimile jobs from network users. The dedicated fax servers have modem ports to directly transmit the fax message as well as perform all fax management related operations. One disadvantage of using server class machines as the fax server is the substantial cost of server machines. Another disadvantage is that such fax servers would be limited to rendering fax documents created in server based applications. However, network users most likely create fax documents with common application programs that are more likely to execute on personal computer oriented machines, such as word processors, graphics programs, spreadsheet programs, etc., that do not run efficiently or at all on the server machine. Thus, users could not use the fax server to transmit the type of documents they are most likely to have.
Another prior art network fax solution involves the use of a Windows NT server as a dedicated fax server that receives, renders, transmits and otherwise manages the facsimile message. The Windows NT fax server includes a modem port to transmit the facsimile as well as perform all fax management related operations. One disadvantage of this approach is that the Windows NT machine performs both fax rendering as well as fax transmission operations. Because both these operations are computationally intensive, in large network environments, many of these Windows NT machines must be provided to perform both rendering and fax transmission. A further disadvantage of this approach is that faxed documents are limited to those application programs that run on a Windows NT system. Such prior art systems cannot handle fax attachments created using application programs that run on other operating systems, such as UNIX, AIX, OS/400, etc.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an improved approach for allowing the facsimile transmission of documents created using different application programs on different operating system platforms.
To overcome the limitations in the prior art described above, preferred embodiments disclose a method, system, and program for processing a message in a network computing system including a facsimile transmission comprised of a recipient contact address, such as a phone number, e-mail address, etc., and one or more attached files. Facsimile transmissions are managed as fax jobs in a fax management system. For each attachment file in the fax job, the fax management system determines a network address of a computer including an application program capable of converting the attachment file to at least one image in a file format. Different computers at different network addresses are capable of converting different attachment file types to at least one image in the file format. The fax management system transmits the attachment file to the computer at the determined network address and the computer receiving the attachment file executes one application program to convert the attachment file to at least one image in a file format. After all the attachment files are converted to at least one image in the file format, the message is sent to a communication port for transmittal to the recipient contact address.
With the preferred embodiments, multiple network computers may be used to render the attachment files from a fax job into a common file format, such as the TIFF file format. This technique maximizes the number of types of documents that may be attached to a fax job, because network computers including different operating systems and application programs, i.e., with installed application programs and one operating system, may be used to render the job to the common fax file format. Further, rendering and converting document requires significant processor resources. Thus, the preferred embodiments reduce the processing load by allowing the attachment files to be distributed among multiple network computers to perform the rendering and conversion. In this way, the attachment files may be rendered concurrently if at least two different network computers are concurrently rendering different types of attachment files for the fax job. Still further, with the preferred embodiments, the fax management server may manage a greater number of faxes as the fax rendering and conversion operations are off-loaded from the fax server managing the fax jobs from different client computers.